Seven Reasons For Having a Digital Marketing Strategy

Seven Reasons For Having a Digital Marketing Strategy

We live in the digital era.

From the moment you get up in the morning to right before you close your eyes for a good night’s sleep, you are “online”. Maybe you are doing it for your business, or just sharing “selfies” with your followers, but you are online. Every day.

So in this digital era where digital marketing is the only means to get yourself noticed online, why aren’t you spending more time and effort on building your own custom Digital Marketing Strategy (DMS)?

A DMS is the plan to streamline your efforts into the different forms of digital marketing you might have employed for you and your brand, including (but not limited to):

• Website
• Blogs
• Online Advertising
• Online video content
• PPC (pay-per-click) advertising
• Email marketing
• Social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, G+, etc)
• Mobile marketing (SMS, MMS, etc)

While you may be using some, or all, of the above forms of digital marketing, a proper strategy can give you so much more.

Here are my 7 reasons why you should have a digital marketing strategy:

1. Integration with your Business Goals

Have you heard of the VMOSA technique? It’s used by organizations to develop strategies, and includes:

• Vision
• Mission
• Objectives
• Strategies
• Action Plans

This VMOSA technique is at an organization level, and digital marketing can be one of the strategies employed to help the organization achieve its objectives in the long run.

By integrating a digital marketing strategy at this top level, you are automatically setting goals and KPIs for your digital marketing efforts. This gives you more direction, and helps you plan, take action, track, measure and analyze your efforts far more better, instead of investing your efforts independently in different forms of digital marketing.

This way, you know what your destination is and you have the map to get there!

2. Claiming Your Market Share

To be successful in your business, you first need to let the world know who you are and what you do. An easy way to establish your identity in your industry is by using your website and blog(s).

This enables you to grab your market share, otherwise, your competitors will beat you to it.

A good digital marketing strategy helps you define who you are, what you do and what you need to say to stand strong in your industry.

3. More Awareness on Who to Target – Go Beyond Local

As you get into defining your strategy for digital marketing, you will grow more aware of your target audience. It might not be just the local market that is interested in your services or products, it can the people in the next town, state, or even country.

Using the right tools to build the buyer persona based on your strategy helps you target more potential leads, leading to more customers, and hence, more success in business.

4. Interact and Engage with the Target Audience, Even in Real Time

You are active on your brand’s social media accounts, but have you analyzed what your goals are, to be active on any social media platform in the first place?

Surely not to discuss the success of the latest Avengers movie!

I am a big fan of the Avengers movie franchise and I love jabbering about it when the right opportunity shows up, but I wouldn’t do that from my brand’s social media account. I would be doing this from my personal account, discussing fan theories on whatever might happen in the next Avengers next year.

My point being you can be wildly popular on social media, but unless you are seeing your interactions and engagement with your followers (not necessarily target audience) yielding in direct sales, or traffic into your website, all your efforts on social media are in vain.

That’s when a good digital marketing strategy comes into play. It would help you engage with the right people at the right time to increase the overall ROI of the brand. Yes, you can still talk about the next Avengers movie, just as long as you are also interacting and engaging with the right audience.

5. Earn Trust by Being Readily Available Online

When you come across a new brand name, what do you do? You look it up on your phone, and if your phone is running out of “juice”, you wait till you can get your hands on your laptop or desktop. But you do look it up. Once you find it, you browse around until you find the information you wanted.

However, if you don’t find a website (or only a really dated one) you start having doubts whether you should have been bothered with the brand in the first place (unless of course, you know someone from that brand—and that’s a different story).

This means at the bare minimum, you need a website to establish that you are legit. And since you have a digital marketing strategy, you already know what you have to display on your website.

6. Provides More Bang for Your Buck – Better ROI

In small businesses or startups, usually 1-2 people are assigned to work on digital marketing. And with a good strategy in place, many (or all) of the goals can be achieved.

However, by comparison, you may have many people working on the ground to sell your services or products, and their levels of success may differ, depending on a various number of reasons.

So when you compare the two (after collecting the necessary data of course), you will realize a good digital marketing strategy helps to bring in better and more ROI.

7. Caters Better to the Mobile Consumers

A lot of people nowadays use their mobile devices to make purchasing decisions. If you want to refill your printer ink, for example, you will search for a service provider near you with your mobile phone or tablet. Even if you don’t make the purchase right away, you will browse to see which businesses can provide the best service—and it all adds up to your final decision.

Believe it or not, but your target audience is also doing the same with you. They are trying to see if you are the best in the business and they are most likely using their mobile devices to search for you and your competition online to make a decision.

If you have a good digital marketing strategy in place, you would have already done all that you can do to entice that target audience to you, and away from your competition. And that’s why a good strategy will help you.

In Conclusion

So what do you say? Are you ready to set up your digital marketing strategy?

Start with your brand’s strategy using the VMOSA technique mentioned in this article, and half your work will be done by the time you get to the point where you have to plan your overall digital marketing strategy for your brand.

Remember to also define your brand voice and tone while doing this. Your brand voice is the personality and tone is the emotion of your brand. And you have to stick to it to build good brand authority online.